A Week With iPhone 3.0
When a new piece of software or hardware comes out people often rush to be the first to review it, but I have found that there are often things that you only find after a while of using something that you don’t discover when you only use it for a day or two. With that in mind I’ve waited a week before writing about the new iPhone 3.0 software. By now, if you haven’t upgraded yourself, you’ve probably read about most of the new features so this is going to be more of a “what does it feel like in normal use” kind of review rather than breaking down every new feature and upgrade that the new iPhone OS has brought.
So then, what does it feel like in normal use? Pretty damn good actually. One of the things that has struck me about using 3.0 is its stability and completeness. Normally with a major new release of any operating system there are rough edges until the first couple of point releases or “service packs”. iPhone 3.0 however is remarkably solid. I have encountered a couple of bugs, but these are pretty minor and in many ways it is more stable that the previous version. The only thing I have had happen to me is the screen stopped responding to gestures once, but toggling the sleep wake button fixed it. Battery life and reception seem about the same, but opening and quitting applications seems faster.
In terms of new features, the things I’ve found myself using the most are cut, copy and paste, and spotlight. Copy and paste is superb. It’s so natural to use you quickly forget that there was a time it wasn’t there. It’s fluid and integrated so well that I’m glad they took the time to do it properly and not rush it. I have found myself using it a lot over the last week and I have no gripes with it at all. It has made the phone so much more useful when you don’t have your laptop with you and if the upgrade cost anything I would say it is worth the price alone. (If you have an iPod touch then it is worth the price!) One of the great things about this too is the way you can copy links. If you come to a page with a link in it or someone sends you an email (or a text message, or an instant message in AIM or Skype or some other IM app) with a link, before there was no easy way to send that on to someone else. Now you just tap and hold on the link and up pops the copy button. Very slick, very natural and very useful.
I thought spotlight was going to be a gimmick to be honest, but I have found myself using it quite a lot. One thing that I really like about it is that you’re able to go straight to a song or a podcast etc. without launching the iPod application first. Here’s an example. The other day I was out for a walk and I had one of the tracks from the soundtrack to the new Star Trek movie stuck in my head. Normally to play this I’d have to launch the iPod app, select albums, scroll to the album I wanted, then go in and select the track. Now I can swipe right type the first few characters and jump straight to the track. What would normally take 20 seconds or more I did in about 5. One of my favourite mac applications is launch bar, and this is like having launch bar on your iPhone.
Speaking of the iPod there have been a couple of changes of note there that are quite useful. The first is scrubbing. Before when you wanted to scrub through a track you swiped with the bar at the top and that was pretty much it. It wasn’t very precise. Now though, you have multiple levels of scrubbing from “high speed” to “fine”. To use it you drag the bar as you normally would then as you slide your finger down the screen you vary the level of precision. It’s very clever, but a bit hard to describe in words, so here’s a quick video explaining the process:
iPhone Scrubbing from Thomas Fitzgerald on Vimeo.
The other interesting thing I’ve noticed is that they’ve changed the options that come up when you’re playing a podcast. You now get the option of sending a link to the podcast in iTunes via email and there’s also a button to re-play the last 30 seconds.
Another, less than obvious feature that is a god send in iPhone 3.0 is the ability of third party apps to use the built in mail sheet. In fact I would go so far as to say this is the single best feature of iPhone 3.0. In the past when an app wanted to send an email it would send you out of the App and into Mail. This was annoying and time consuming and if you were in the middle of something would often put you off. Now though, you can send email from within the app it makes things so much more simple and fluid, and goes at least part fo the way to addressing one of the bigger annoyances of not being able to multitask.
And, while on the subject of not being able to multitask, I was pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of push notification. I have been a little sceptical of this in the past, but it seems to work very well. Two of the Apps I have are making use of it so far. The first is AP Mobile, from the Associated Press. It now sends me messages when there’s breaking news. And they’re pretty quick about it too. I got the message about Michael Jackson’s untimely death the other night (it was midnight our time|) before I had heard it anywhere else and I got a push notification message about Madoff’s sentencing just as it came up on BBC world news (on the TV) so It’s certainly put to good effect. The other app of course is AIM, which is also remarkably prompt. There’s no delay between the sender sending a message and it popping up on my phone as a pushed message. Only time will tell how well it scales but so far, considering what’s actually involved from a server point of view in doing push notification, kudos has to go out to Apple for pulling this off so well.
Some other things of note in no particular order: Note Syncing makes notes finally useful (mind you I used them a lot anyway) but the default error message that pops up warning you every time you sync your phone and you’ve changed so much as one note is annoying. This however can be fixed by changing the settings in iSync, but then this is not immediately obvious either. Having the landscape keyboard is nice, but I never really used it that much anyway. Actually, in some ways it’s annoying because you’ll be reading your email and the screen will swing around because you’re holding the phone to one side. I think they need to include a way to lock the orientation.
Safari does seem noticeably faster too. It’s funny though. Safari on the iPhone works so well, that you really don’t think about it. It’s just there and it just works. It’s one of the things that makes the iPhone such a great user experience. The only other really major change i noticed is in the App store. Screenshots are now part of an Apps description page and it no longer sends you to a separate screen for that. As for messaging, I’ve sent one MMS so I couldn’t really care much about that, although it’s nice that text messages send in the background now. As for tethering, o2 Ireland hasn’t announced support for it yet, so we’ll have to wait on that one. I’m not expecting to to be an economical option either, considering the iPhone’s data cap here is set at 1gb. We’re still waiting on visual voicemail, so I won’t hold my breath about tethering.
So that’s about it really. If this round up has seemed overwhelmingly positive, it’s because that’s how my experience with the new software has been. It is a solid stable upgrade and if you haven’t done it already then I suggest you do. If you have an iPod touch and are wondering if it is worth the price, I would say that if you use it for more than an iPod, then it is. Copy and paste alone makes it worth it alone.
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